Gas turbine engines may be used to power various systems. For example, gas turbine engines may be used to power aircraft, ships and electrical generators. FIG. 1 illustrates a gas turbine engine 10 for an aircraft according to an example. The gas turbine engine 10 has a principal and rotational axis 11 and comprises, in axial flow series, an air intake 12, a propulsive fan 13, an intermediate pressure compressor 14, a high-pressure compressor 15, combustion equipment 16, a high-pressure turbine 17, and intermediate pressure turbine 18, a low-pressure turbine 19, and an exhaust nozzle 20. A nacelle 21 generally surrounds the engine 10 and defines both the intake 12 and the exhaust nozzle 20.
In operation, air entering the intake 12 is accelerated by the fan 13 to produce two air flows: a first air flow into the intermediate pressure compressor 14 and a second air flow which passes through a bypass duct 22 to provide propulsive thrust. The intermediate pressure compressor 14 compresses the air flow directed into it before delivering that air to the high pressure compressor 15 where further compression takes place.
The compressed air exhausted from the high-pressure compressor 15 is directed into the combustion equipment 16 where it is mixed with fuel and the mixture combusted. The resultant hot combustion products then expand through, and thereby drive the high, intermediate and low-pressure turbines 17, 18, 19 before being exhausted through the nozzle 20 to provide additional propulsive thrust. The high 17, intermediate 18 and low 19 pressure turbines drive respectively the high pressure compressor 15, intermediate pressure compressor 14 and fan 13, each by a suitable interconnecting shaft.
Modelling a gas turbine engine may be a time consuming process and require significant human resources. In order to perform certain analysis tasks which are necessary to predict the performance and integrity of a gas turbine, it may be necessary to tessellate the surfaces of its components, or some approximate representation thereof. Similarly, it may be necessary to tessellate the volumes of solid parts and/or of gas cavities delimited by them. This operation is referred to in literature as ‘meshing’ and the tessellations are known as ‘meshes’. Meshes may comprise any arrangement of polyhedra, polygons, edges and vertices which describe a gas turbine or its components in a way suitable for analysis. The operation of meshing may be applied to assemblies composed of more than one component, or to a part of a component
In order to perform certain analysis tasks as above, it may also be necessary to associate certain properties to the boundaries of the meshes. In order to do so, a user may manually enter such properties for each mesh boundary. Such data entry may be time consuming for the user. Furthermore, there is a danger that errors may be introduced by the user during data entry that may result in surfaces having incorrect properties.